Fine China

Blue-and-white porcelain is still all the rage

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Tastemakers from 18th-century monarchs to designer Ralph Lauren have nursed a passion for blue-and-white porcelain. But no collector was more obsessed than American artist James McNeill Whistler of "Whistler's Mother" fame. In the 1870s the dashing expat bought it, painted still lifes of it, and created the infamous Peacock Room, a radically chic dining room in London, whose gold-dappled walls were loaded with prime examples of Chinese porcelain. "Chinamania" at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D. C.—where the Peacock Room now resides—celebrates the artist's obsession with blue-and-white porcelain and how his love for this precious commodity launched a fad that persists today.

"Chinamania: Whistler and the Victorian Craze for Blue-and-White," through August 2011, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution; http://www.asia.si.edu.